skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To expand on that, even long before 2010 it was really clear that Symbian as a technology could not compete with newer approaches like iOS and even Android and Nokia's own Meego/Maemo. Maybe Nokia could have changed that situation by actually improving Symbian dramatically, but they didn't. It's pretty much a turd of an operating system from the user's and technological point of view. (Now don't get me wrong, I absolutely accept the Joel Spolsky "Never do rewrites" school of thought, but it's no excuse to let your software stagnate.)

And in 2010, iOS and Android were growing much faster than Symbian and Blackberry, even if the latter had some growth - mostly due to price reductions, I suppose. I know that in 2010, I no longer considered Symbian a smartphone operating system. "Smartphone" is a relative term: the bar rises with time.

By the way: one thing that struck me as odd in the original Elop presentation was that he projected that a very large fraction (IIRC half or so) of the future handset sales would be feature phones and dumbphones that wouldn't even run Symbian...
I think it's an admission and warning that you might be ranty, and there's probably not a good-enough reason for it.
Actually, my experience with PyPy, while generally positive, has exhibited many of the characteristics that article talks about in terms of downsides to "sufficiently-smart compilers." It's almost always much faster than cpython, but how much faster is highly variable, and not especially predictably so; seemingly-insignificant changes can have large and unexpected performance implications, and it's difficult as a developer to have the proper mental model to figure out what's actually going on.

In CPython land, Python is slower, but performs predictably, and if you want to speed it up you write C, which is much faster, and also performs predictably, though it takes some developer effort. In PyPy, you get some of the speed of C without the effort, but without the predictability either.
I don't know how much Apple really cares about the ability to run Windows on their hardware. I always had the impression that Bootcamp was done just as a bonus because it was easy to do, not because they saw dual-booting as something essential. Even if they did, that whole area is waning fast. I wouldn't be surprised if they tossed Bootcamp aside without a second thought.
I couldn't agree more with this posting. I would take it a step beyond the story aligning with the needs of someone else and the transaction. If it is something you truly believe in, it becomes a story you enjoy telling over and over, regardless of the outcome. People enjoy spreading passion, and when you are spreading passion, it ceases to become marketing in the "traditional sense" of a self-serving corporate activity, and it just becomes the act of sharing interest and excitement.
I had an experience very similar to Brennan's recently. Appointment Reminder, the SaaS which I wish was the center of gravity of my business at the moment, is profitable but not profitable enough to hire the folks and buy the things that I want to accelerate growth of it.

So I have been supporting it by consulting, but when I'm consulting I'm not selling Appointment Reminder accounts, and consulting is always more distracting than I expect it to be. (You think I would realize this after two years of it, but I persistently underestimate how much time it takes to e.g. prospect for new clients, negotiate/schedule engagements, travel to them, and deal with follow-up stuff like invoices.)

The traditional option for scaling a software business with a working product and actual customers is to take investment, but that's another ball of wax. There's fairly attractive options in angel investing these days, but taking any outside money would have an outsized effect on the character of my business at the moment, and I'm not ready to pull that trigger yet. Also, like consulting, raising an investment round is a very distracting event -- it basically commits you to months of doing near no productive work. (And unlike consulting, taking investment causes time debt which is impossible to discharge until you exit your business: you're now committed to keeping those investors happy and in the loop for, well, forever in business terms.)

But, having seen a lot of smart software companies do side projects (37signals was a big fan of it, and Amy Hoy and company have quite a bit of success) I decided to try my hand at it once and see how it went. So I started packaging one of my most-commonly-a-win consulting offerings as an online course, and decided to experiment with it once. (And, like Brennan says and like everybody in the space will tell you, I started by making an email list and sending them lots of free stuff they enjoyed which further burnished my credibility on the subject.)

The experiment was very successful: my customers seem to have liked what I produced, many of them have actually used it to positive effect in their business, and it raised a significant amount of money. (I'll probably blog in detail about it later).

An unanticipated side effect was, because of the topic I picked for my video course, I actually sat down and took all my own advice for a change (AR had an email strategy which I would have never let fly at a consulting client simply because I shipped the minimum necessary and never revisited that decision), and that ended up working out very well.

So, basically, yes: confirmation from someone else, this does work and it is perfectly compatible with running a software business.
> A ban on DRM (digital restriction mechanisms), or at a bare minimum, making it explicitly legal to break digital restriction mechanisms if needed for any use that is itself legal.

I don't see how banning DRM entirely would ever be a good idea. Lots of code could be misconstrued as DRM, and there are a number of free speech concerns that remind me of bans on encryption up to certain key lengths. What about building DRM for research purposes, code analysis, etc? Why exactly would DRM need to be banned when it has always been so easy to work around?
Appreciate the response, and think you're probably right. I'd be interested in better numbers, though. It's not the mass of the ice cream that't the problem, but the fuel necessary to get that mass to orbit. I think that's about 10x. And it's the percentage of weight at altitude that matters, since that's where the maneuvering was being done, which brings the weight down by about 90%. That's why I was guessing it was a .1% increase, but don't know for sure.
But PC is only the first step! The more accepting a society is, the less PC is needed, because people embrace each other without a need for self-censorship and no one is offended.
This just seem like blind hate. I don't know if the 920 will do well but how is it not competitive?

Nokia's mistake was a year or so ago in picking Windows Phone over Android, it was five years ago just sitting on their lead and not coming out with innovative products.
Oh, you mean the astronomically higher incarceration rates of blacks? The ridiculous voter ID laws being introduced across the country? The increased likelihood of being subject to a 'stop and frisk' despite the decreased likelihood of finding a weapon? The fact that most public school systems are funded by property taxes, so poor areas are underfunded?

I can only imagine you're referring to affirmative action, which I would say has done little to undo generations of structural inequality.
AFAIK, yes that is the case.
Okay, so you have given a few examples of sexism.

So why do you think we shouldn't talk about this? Don't you think that what you've just described, being more prevalent in the US, warrants the discussion? Don't you think it's irrelevant and destructive to play the quote at the end of your article telling us just to get back to work?
Hey Ben - thanks so much. I'll send you an email shortly.

Max
I'm not sure that's true. My hypothesis is that we find it easier to meet and communicate with people similar to us, so marketing a product aimed at other developers is an obvious path. There is lots of money to be made by getting out of our stupid little bubble--last week I went for coffee with a guy that sells a modern UI for a legacy system in the construction industry. His code base is probably not the prettiest, and he has less than ten clients, but he is a multi-millionaire.
Regardless of anyone's opinion on Windows Phone, the Lumia 920 should be a pretty competitive phone. Furthermore I always had the impression that owners of Lumia 800 & 900 devices were very happy with.

It remains to be seen how successful the 920 will be but saying Nokia hasn't anything in the pipeline seems far from accurate.
Red Bull Stratos Jump Date Set For Sunday
The "mass stereotypes" you're mentioning here are respectively called "testosterone" and "oxytocin". It could be that, one day, someone is able to prove that there is more to it, but I'm certain that obtusely comparing a hormonal effect with "jews love money" won't help much...
I really don't think my point was that complicated. The OP latched on to a minor word choice in order to make a judgment about the poster's competence. If we picked an equally arbitrary measure, like github excellence, the OP would not fair so well either. However, it is quite obvious that both metrics are fairly poor. Instead of making snap judgments of people, maybe we could just give them the benefit of the doubt?
What I would find more important than a comparison of technical features is a comparison of their active communities.

How many people are using each project, how active is development, that sort of thing.
Cool! PM me at willthefirst@gmail.com, and I can explain what it's gonna be. We would need to get it done relatively soon, but I think it could be up and running by the end of the week.
Link to the youtube demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJTLReh8iFY
I think Nokia's strategy is to bet everything on windows 8 on both phones and tablets but also to offer better hardware (such as the camera), if this strategy fails then I would agree to call Nokia's strategy a failure. It's too soon to tell for now, the only sure thing is that Nokia's strategy so far in the smartphone market has been a succession of failure and bad decisions. Let's see how it turns out this time. There's also the conspiracy theory that Microsoft may buy them and that they're failing on purpose to lower their value...
How do you see yourself in relation to ResearchGate, a startup in Berlin that apparently is quite 'respectable' in the Berlin startup scene? Surely they cannot have escaped your attention...

(and I know for a fact that you have not escaped theirs)
> It would be insulting to point out to him any of his actions as sexist, because he really isn't.

You were doing fine up until this sentence. So well that I suspect you know better. But in case you don't, have some dialogue:

"Did you know that, when you make the site crash because you're testing code in production, we lose users because they're frustrated about our uptime?"

"Oh, gosh, I just wanted to make sure my code worked in that environment! ...but it was insulting for you to point it out to me. I actually wanted for us to gain users from the cool new features I'm building!"
My biggest problem with this explanation is that even if the star-filled universe were infinite that doesn't necessarily mean there would be a star at every point you look at in the sky.

Depending on the density of the stars in space, it's quite probable that as you zoom in farther and farther you see more and more distant stars, you also see space between those stars. It becomes a limit problem where the 'star density' of the sky (vectors from your viewpoint which will eventually hit a star) gets closer and closer to a specific percentage the further you extend your sphere of view (or magnification level) but will never exceed it, and won't ever go to 1.
You would likely enjoy Permutation City by Greg Egan if you haven't read it yet. It touches on the idea of viewing a simulation from the inside.
Because there are better avenues (despite initial reactions, gender quotas in some EU countries managed to change deeply rooted corporate attitudes). And sometimes PC is misleading. I imagine if your workplace says "Our company welcomes women", it implies that it shouldn't be taken for granted, which would be illegal.
s/Paypal/The credit card issuers/g

I'm a Paypal employee, so I'm biased, but when the credit card company decides to reverse a payment, Paypal really doesn't have a lot of options.
I think the problem is mostly that a todo list is too simple an example for these frameworks and that's why it seems like they're just adding extra structure. That extra structure is (hopefully) going to save you a lot of code once your app gets more complex.
PATTERN NUMBER ONE: DON'T USE PYTHON IF YOU NEED PERFORMANCE
The new and improved Wodboard
A friend of mine doing UX stuff actually uses it regularly to instantly see the structure of pages. He's doesn't usually touch developer tools generally, and stays away from any CSS or HTML learning intentionally. But he uses this.
What about: rsync to the external flash drive (or whatever your sneakernet is based on), then rsync from the flash drive to your public-facing website.
Interesting: when I visit this doc (on Google Docs), there's a line at the top of the page that says:

"Wow, this file is really popular! Some tools might be unavailable until the crowd clears. [Try again] [Dismiss]"

This strikes me as a strange choice by the Google Docs team; rather than fixing the problem, they just tell you it exists. I mean, this is Google; don't they have lots of bandwidth and server capacity? Why can't they handle traffic spikes? Can anyone here shed some light on this?
> What specifically do we know about consciousness and life that's incompatible with this account?

Nothing but all of it -- the metaphysical account of life after death.

> It's conventional to assume that living organisms are somehow the vessel of consciousness ...

Yes. What is unconventional is to assume that the consciousness survives the body in a different form. This would be like hypothesizing that all ice cream cones live on in a metaphysical plane after they've melted in this one. Before accepting this idea, I would want to see some evidence that is more than anecdote.

> ... but is that assumption strictly mandated by any particular empirical evidence?

Nope. Neither is this.

> How would you propose even to frame such an idea as a rigorously testable hypothesis?

Good question. But the absence of a reasonable answer doesn't support an argument in favor or life after death. The fact that we can't resolve the central question about consciousness in a scientific way, doesn't stand as an argument for expanding the dimensions of our ignorance into new, uncharted territory.
In this day and age it seems like the phone's ecosystem is even a stronger driving force than the quality of the phone itself. While the Lumia 8xx and 9xx are very nice devices (and I even think Win Phone 7/8 is a very nice OS), I wouldn't purchase a Lumia solely on what I perceived to be a young and unproven ecosystem around the OS.

All I hear is Win Phone 7/8 (3rd party) apps are limited in variety and and quality. Its a very hard sell when iOS and Android have such an expansive catalog of (quality) apps.

Phones these days are about the software -- good HW is table stakes.
I think that that "UK" makes quite a difference. In my experience, British education focuses more on historical and philosophical (aka 'impractical' :-)) knowledge than that of most other countries.

That experience is heavily colored by watching University Challenge and Mastermind, but I do not think that makes a difference when comparing the top levels (which, I guess, we are; those not in the top levels at A level physics will not remember hearing about Olbert's paradox)
Fascinating read. I always enjoyed my Symbian phones, since the interface was pretty damn good for the keypad form factor, and I have a big soft spot for sliders; the behind-the-scenes mess that grew out of the late-90s platform tech goes a long way to explain more about why quality apps were so few and far between.

True background multitasking on a phone in 2006 was really fun, though.
I think they know how many machines are using bootcamp or VMWare / Parallels and it isn't a small percentage. These are the gateway products that allow a lot of folks to buy a Macintosh.
Wow - reading this is highly suggested, especially given the article relevance in the still current browser-war history!
Re: Blogging Is Back
Its not hate. I've used Lumias and they're just fine. The design is certainly a wonderful breath of fresh air. But their new flagship is still two months out, its not even priced yet, has poor carrier support (domestic AND global), a fourth(?) place app market, and fourth place consumer mindshare. It also represents a partial reboot of the Windows Mobile 7 platform, with all that entails.

There are so many more things that need to go right just beyond the handset for it to be a competitor, and they're not going right.
>Well, it's not being used later on to make decisions, is it?

No, you have a point there. I missed that part. Though I just realized your new definition implies this: a river has memory.

To each their own :) I'll still call it too broad, but that's pure opinion.
Right so how do you know lack of testosterone (and/or presense of oestrogen) doesn't cause someone to be bad at maths or cause them to have an crying fit during high pressure situations

BAN WOMEN CEOS
Suicide is Cheaper
HostGator and A Small Orange are both cheap shared hosts I can recommend that ssh. The only shared host I have run into that didn't support SSH was $25 / month for 1 MySQL database and some paltry amount of storage space.

I'm sure there are a lot of cheap shared hosts that don't provide SSH, but there are hundreds that do, and the big players (who are the most reliable anyway) definitely do.
Because when I took that screenshot (last week), we we're only 1/3 of the way through October :-)
Daniel Ellsberg discusses this in a great talk at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The US didn't think Khrushchev was insane enough to delegate control over the weapons (which we did and still do), but he in fact had. He revoked delegation at some point after Kennedy's speech if I recall correctly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk1-2qtWph0
Neat. The AST module was a good way for me as a novice-intermediate programmer to get better acquainted with parsing. I have a small module that parses raw Solr-style querystrings into Haystack's SQ objects. Haven't touched it in months but it was a good learning exercise. https://github.com/mattdeboard/rawqs-sq
after 20+ years w/o pascal i'am currently working with pascal(fp/laz) again. i really love it!
Just a guess, but October is only 13 days in. Thus, about half the revenue so far this month.
That defeats the purpose. If I have a great idea for a product and I want to work on it, why would I go work for somebody else instead? A much better idea would be to join forces with a marketing guy or girl or hire one.
The new website now contains less content; noticeably the DCPU-16 spec is missing. Looks like he's in the middle of retooling. There is a video demo though.
Probably they have reserved bandwidth for paid Google Apps accounts, and although Google is a computing giant, it's bandwidth is not unlimited. And about fixing it, I don't think this is a bug, it's a feature.
Just my opinion.
We recently had to make a choice between frameworks and my colleague and I came from a jquery/rails background, virtually no practical experience with js frameworks. We started with backbone.js, but I was immediately frustrated. We then switched to angular.js after going through the tutorial ~2hrs.

Four months and a lot of learning later, I am very happy with our choice. If I ever get some spare time I want to write some posts on angular from a rails perspective. I found the rails nomenclature I was used to didn't directly translate to angular.

One other reason we chose angular, it is backed by Google. The meetups I have attended in Seattle keep growing steadily and the mailing list is great.
Hi, I am the developer of this upcoming app. I was doing this in part-time and week-end. It took almost 8-9 months to make this into this state.
VB I doubt, at least not in the type of enterprise projects I usually work on.

You can do web development in Delphi.
GIL or no GIL, threads run concurrently in Python. The difference might be in performance:

- IO-bound tasks: GIL is released
- CPU-bound tasks on N-core on a single host. To exploit multiple CPUs:

a) no GIL (hypothetical): N times speed up (optimistically)
(it suggests weak data dependency i.e.,
multiprocessing can be used to the same effect)

b) option a) with multiple processes (shared memory or communication-based approach)
Code complexity is the same on average (except on Windows)

c) C extensions (existing or new): speed up 10*N or more on numerical code
Cython makes it easy to write new extensions.
Currently due to dynamic nature of Python, GIL or no GIL,
C extensions might be necessary to exploit hardware fully
(though C extensions might not be an option in some projects)

- scalable to multiple hosts tasks: different processes i.e., GIL is not a problem

Benefits of GIL:

- C extensions (and the interpreter) are simpler to write correctly.
Multithreaded programming is not trivial we need all the help we can get.
- no performance penalty for single-threaded code
- it encourages a synchronization through communication concurrent model (builtin in Go)

Disadvantages:

- some applications have no localized performance bottlenecks.
So writing a small C extension won't help to get possible
performance benefits of running on multicore in parallel.
If performance is critical; Python might not be the right tool in this case
- there are pathological cases when performance suffers greatly due to GIL
(though other approaches would have their own pathological cases)
- a (non-informed) perception that Python can't benefit from multicore
We're only 13 days into October.
Yes that's the end game
It's hard to imagine nowadays, but in the late 1990's, Nokia made cell phones Americans craved. Their blunder in the US market was to think they didn't have to get in bed with specific carriers and make phones exclusive to one or another. A titan the world over, Nokia was surely surprised at how effectively they could be diminished by the business model the US carriers settled on. They never recovered in the US, and I don't think they ever will.
2 Years ago, I contributed to a project that would do the same thing: https://github.com/ezyang/git-ftp
Anybody knows the difference ?
There's a problem around work and male/female relationships that's quite far away from adultery:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/06/im-not-y...

In particular: "so many of the attitudes her work unveils are of an 'unconscious nature,' which makes beating them back particularly difficult" and "male leaders may think they are elevating women, not stifling them."

There's other research suggesting that "being made aware" of the problem helps male leaders adjust behavior.

http://www.20-first.com/690-0-improving-the-gender-balance-a... (see the section on "diversity training")

And this article about the effect of belief that an organization is meritocratic on fairness:

http://m.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/care...

There's significant pressure to not talk about sexism directly and just address this as a conflict between two individiuals (see antirez's rant) -- even though the research says that talking about about sexism and fairness concepts changes the behavior of management.